20 FISHES OF FANCY. 



standing simply on its own dignity, and yet upholding upon 

 its Atlantic carapace all the burdens of the round world and 

 them that dwell therein ! Here is a subject for Walt 

 Whitman himself, the self-sufficient, democratic, thewy-and- 

 sinewy, double-sexed, bully-for-you, old tortoise. More 

 power to your shell, sir ! We creeping things take off our 

 hats to you, testudinous ancient. And how splendidly 

 the deliberate thing looms out of Hindoo myth as the here- 

 ditary foe of the mystical elephant, the Darkness !* The 

 Red Indian to this day says that in the beginning of 

 things there was nothing but a tortoise. It brooded upon 

 space : covered Chaos as with a lid. But after a while it 

 woke up : its solitary existence was irksome to it, and it 

 sank splendidly into the abysmal depths ; and lo ! when it 

 re-emerged, there was the terrestrial globe upon its back ! 

 For something to do, it had fished up our earth from its 

 depths in the protoplasmic liquids, and, rather than be idle, it 

 still keeps on holding it up. But some day it will sink again, 

 and then will come the End — with Ragnarok and Arma- 

 geddon. In Greek and Roman fancies the tortoise hardly 

 fares so well. It is the form to which a bright nymph, who 

 had jested at the nuptials of Zeus and Here, was turned 

 into by Mercury ; and ridicule falls upon the greatest of the 

 Greeks when a tortoise falls upon his head. Yet they, too, 



* " As the elephant and tortoise both frequent the shores of the same 

 lake, they mutually annoy each other, renewing and maintaining in 

 mythical zoology the strife which exists between the two mythical 

 brothers who fight with each other for the kingdom of the heavens, 

 either in the form of twilights or of equinoxes, or of sun and moon. 

 In the particular struggle between the tortoise and the elephant, 

 terminated by the bird Garuda, who carries them both up into the 

 air in order to devour them, the tortoise and elephant seem, however, 

 especially to personify the two twilights of the day, and the two twilights 

 of the year." — Gubcrnatis. 



